


Behind the Light

by femvoidfish



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: AU where Mama is 20 years younger so I feel less guilty about this smut, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 02:35:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16359047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femvoidfish/pseuds/femvoidfish
Summary: Aubrey Little tries to figure herself out, and sort of succeeds. About grief, sexuality, and recovery.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Nebulous discussion of sexual violence and homophobia in this chapter, nothing explicit. This is an AU of Amnesty where Mama is twenty years younger and nothing else is different, because I have a terrible weakness for butch women from Appalachia and I wanted to write in-character smut.

It never occurred to Aubrey that she might die in that cave. She recognizes in hindsight, in the hospital, that she’d been thinking about it as a video game, or a movie where she was the main character. As soon as she’d seen the fire come out of her hands, it was hard not to see everything that happened after as another plot point. 

She’s spent the two years since her mom died thinking about death constantly, a million gruesome possibilities flitting through her mind every day—but the realization of her powers and her abrupt entry into an ongoing drama had made her feel divorced from that fear. Looking back, all her obsessive scenarios seem almost comical, and she wonders how much of that was true fear for herself and how much was a clumsy attempt to integrate death into a daily life that hadn’t had room for it. Before her mom died she had no idea what death was, but before she lost consciousness in the cave she had only half an idea—death as something that took people away, that ripped them abruptly and absurdly from your life, never to be seen again. Death as a magician, a master of disappearance, but not death as a state of being she would one day inhabit. 

She had only just begun to peel herself carefully away from her mom, from the closeness of her childhood. But then her mom had dissolved, that closeness had dissolved, and Aubrey was left with all the feelings she was working through. Love, longing, resentment, an impulse to push and an impulse to pull. But now there was nothing to brace against. Lying on the ground in the cave had been the closest she had felt to her mom since the day she died. She had felt the shock of recognition, like her mom was waiting to receive her, but also something else, too. Her body mimicked her mom’s body. Like burning (nearly) to death was another painful hereditary milestone, along with menarche, giving birth, the bunions that Aubrey knows will grow into her feet as she ages. 

But now her lungs hurt. Worse than that is the shallowness of her breathing, her frustration and panic indistinguishable as she claws in each breath. This the part of monster hunting that doesn’t make the movie, and this is the part that her mom never made it to. It doesn’t have the magical touch of grief over it. Her lungs heal quickly but that doesn’t matter—what matters are the first few hours of consciousness, understanding truly for the first time what labored breathing really means. She feels so silly about it that she doesn’t say it out loud, but she knows now that she could die.

Left home has a meaning for her that it doesn’t have for her friends, who occasionally email her from whatever Ivy they got into to tell her that they failed their first test or lost their virginity. People had asked over and over why she had done it—friends, teachers, in a steady trickle of carefully worded emails and phone calls frequently including the not-particularly-subtle implication that they had thought her mom’s death would change her mind. She had ignored most of them, and not told anyone the truth but Kristie—who had not really asked. But that was because Kristie had already known. Telling Kristie the truth had been a gift of trust, not an admission. 

The truth was that originally it had been an impulse, and not a particularly mature one. She wanted to be a different kind of person, had felt like it was her right or duty to be a different kind of person. The simultaneous width and narrowness of college had looked a lot like a trap, a funnel into the kind of life she didn’t want. But then, after the fire, all she wanted was to be somewhere where she didn’t have to look at her father’s sunken face and couldn’t drive over to the house again, to look at the caved in room in the back, stand there for hours and stare. She wanted to be somewhere where she didn’t have to submit constantly to being totally known, somewhere where her exact emotional state an any point wasn’t absolutely obvious to everyone, somewhere where she didn’t have to talk about it. 

Aubrey is grateful for their last conversation, for her mom giving her blessing just before she went. But there’s a problem right there, too: if Aubrey’s mom was alive she wouldn’t feel so beholden to her, wouldn’t spend so much time guessing what she wanted. She would call her, and ask, and disregard her mom’s opinion if she felt like it. If her mom had died rejecting her life’s path, even, Aubrey would have had to learn to disregard her opinion despite her grief. Instead she’s left wondering what her mom would think at every moment, knowing that she is truly beyond caring. Aubrey can’t please a ghost, even if pretending she can assuages her grief. Aubrey can’t live her life like that. 

Besides all this, accepting parents are a bitch. They say they love you always, but you’ve lived with them for eighteen years, and you learned to read faces from their faces. You say the truth out loud and then you watch in their face what they heard when you spoke. Aubrey hates the word bisexual, for this exact reason. But if you have accepting parents, the only acceptable feeling to have about them is gratitude, especially if one of them is dead, if you miss her like an amputated limb. Aubrey needed to run away if she was going to look her anger in the face. To say to herself, they would have rather had a straight daughter, but I’m glad I am who I am. 

But there is a problem with running away. Whatever you’re running away from remains in your head as a negative of the original image. The path you took to avoid it traces its outline. You never really escape it, and it becomes harder and harder to stop running. Harder and harder to go back and confront it. To heal. 

Aubrey needs a place to land, a place that is and isn’t home. She thinks about the flame bright pendant, and she’s watched the movies, okay. Maybe her powers are her mom’s powers—or the culmination of something that her mom carried in her body without knowing. Another way for her to be in her mom’s shoes and feel what she felt. A way to say goodbye, or at least to look her grief in the face again. Aubrey needs to figure this out. 

Aubrey was lonely on the road. She likes the Lodge and its strange denizens, she likes Duck, she even likes Ned. And the monster hunting is fun. Aubrey tells Barclay she’s staying and settles in. 

But then Mama doesn’t come back.

 

Aubrey is not good at hiding feelings, but she is great at misdirection. All closeted teenagers learn deception, but some people need some extra help, like a hobby doing magic tricks, to figure it out. Dr. Harris Bonkers is her go-to, but she has started to think she should diversify. Mama, at least, is the type to see right through her and say nothing about it. 

Dani is great to watch movies with, but they rarely go into deep topics. Aubrey has a feeling this is because Dani is worried Aubrey will demand quid pro quo, and Dani doesn’t want to talk about her exile, that much is obvious. Aubrey is thankful. Resolving to confront her mom’s death still isn’t the same as wanting to talk about it. Even so, Aubrey is by nature a very open person. One day she finally cracks and says, “Do you think she’s okay?”

Dani doesn’t pause the movie. This is typical of her. Kristie would have paused the movie, but Kristie also would not have given Aubrey the gift that Dani gives her, which is to say straightforwardly and without any playing dumb about who she is referring to, “Mama is fine. Mama is always fine. She could survive the—what was that thing the other day...” Dani, grotesquely, mimes chestbursting aliens.

This is a great development. “The Alien movies? You mean she could be Ripley?”

“Is that the main woman? Yes. That’s what I meant.”

Aubrey chews on the inside of her cheek, just a little, somber again. “So she’s okay?”

“She’s fine.” Dani says, with an air of finality, and unpauses the movie.

 

Mama’s actual name is Bridget. Aubrey knows instinctively why she doesn’t use it. Sometimes, when people call her by name, she can feel suddenly how the name sounds to them, Aubrey, like the ingénue in a Woody Allen film, the horror of the things he did lurking behind the innocent femininity of the name. Like she’s agreed to be a victim just by introducing herself. 

There’s something hateful about her face, too, when she looks in the mirror. The undercut isn’t sufficient to nullify it, although she got it in the hopes that it would help. Sometimes (less, now) her face will shatter in the mirror, she’ll see her eyebrows, her lashes, her mouth, the curve of her chin, all separate from each other, like a list of features with ratings attached to them, like a checklist pinned to the desk of someone paid to photoshop models. Here, shave a bit off. Here, pluck a little higher. Maybe buy an eyelash curler. There’s nothing good about this litany, but worse is the thing lurking behind it—a boy had once told her how cute her snub nose was, how beautiful the bow of her lip, and Aubrey knows the face she makes during orgasm, the way it looks when she half-closes her eyes from exhaustion or desire. She could never stop watching herself, and so she knows intimately what men think when they look at her face. Sometimes, when a man looks at her, she feels something twist, nauseated, low in her stomach, akin to both arousal and disgust; she thinks too much about what it would be like to be disfigured.

Mama, she assumes, does not have this problem, though she may have once. But now the only thing men feel when they look at Mama is confusion. Aubrey knows this isn’t really true—maybe confusion, but loathing too. These are dangerous things. But Mama always seems much too powerful to be subject to that. Aubrey can dream, anyway. 

But she had tried it once. She had bound her breasts, worn a man’s shirt, back when she had a more conventional pixie, tried to push her hair back in a way that looked more androgynous than the timid hairdresser had been willing to allow her. It had not felt good. It had felt horrible, wrong, like a costume, like a child playing dress up. Something had clicked apart in her hands when she had done it, the mirror had turned to a picture of somebody else. 

Now, Aubrey just tries to dress in the most convenient way possible, which is not, of course, practically. Dressing practically has almost no utility in interactions with other people, puts you repeatedly in the position of defending your unattractive flats to women you just met. Still, sometimes, Aubrey overcorrects, dresses so drably outside of her Lady Flame persona that someone says, you could try a little eyeliner…

You have very limited margin for error, when what you perform for a living. Even less if you’re performing hotel lobbies for forty bucks. But she doesn’t talk about this anymore, has a million techniques not to think about it. Occasionally she’ll see a woman wearing something—purple lipstick, or a beautiful dress, and feel an ache of longing. She can’t tell if it’s real or imagined. 

There’s one other problem, right now, that she’s ignoring. Mama never looks at Aubrey twice. But she has rough knuckles, a little dry, with a scar cutting brutally across the palm of her left hand, and short blunt nails. Aubrey aches, and aches, and aches looking at them. Aubrey aches constantly, but she thought—she thought!—that she could just live in the lodge and fight monsters. She thought she wouldn’t have to deal with this mess, with this terrible confusion. Surely the prospect of imminent death would be enough to distract her—but no. She lies awake at night feeling like something is very wrong. She’s not maintaining her undercut and she can barely stand to be in the shower—she looks down at her body and is full of disgust. 

She knows from experience that these are not relatable feelings. That there is something different going on here. She’s tried to explain them before, to close female friends, to boyfriends, to the kind of acquaintances who confess childhood trauma to you in an artificially intimate setting, like a summer camp cabin or a college visit (the one college visit she had gone on). It had never gone well, not once. The reaction was not the guilty pretend-ignorance after confessing something that everyone knows you’re not supposed to talk about. It was the incongruous rage or panicked concern of total incomprehension. 

She thought that being bisexual meant loving beautiful women and handsome men. Mama’s not beautiful, not really, and Dani is. She does love to look at Dani, and is that what sexual attraction is? Wanting to look at someone? 

She can’t describe the feeling she gets, thinking about Mama’s hands. The only thing to compare it to is hunger, but Aubrey grew up well-off and hasn’t ever been so hungry for food that she wanted to hurt someone, steal something, beat at her own stomach. So the feeling now is new. But when she closes her eyes and tries to envision what she wants, what she really wants, all she sees is static. 

 

After breaching the subject with Dani, Aubrey finally feels capable of calling Kristie. She’s missed two weeks of calls, but she had warned Kristie about the national radio quiet zone before entering it. Still, Kristie asked her to try to find a landline, and she’ll have to admit that she’s been at the Lodge. Lying to Kristie is hard for her, even now that she’s gotten a little better lying to other people. Unfairly, Kristie can lie to her easily, though she rarely does—Aubrey knows this because of how often she hates what comes out of Kristie’s mouth. This is one of Kristie’s many charms; she’s a modern-day Cassandra.

It’s eleven PM, and Aubrey’s in the kitchen, alone. She feels like a teenager again, but this is the only line and privacy is hard to come by. 

“Hello?” Kristie says, sounding suspicious.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Jesus, Aubrey.”

“I’m sorry. I’m saying that outright. If you need retribution let me know please.”

“Eventually you’re going to have to learn that that’s not how adult relationships work.”

Aubrey sighs. “Why not? What should I do instead?”

“After you apologize, fix your mistakes going forward. Sit with the guilt about what you’ve already messed up. Don’t require me to absolve you.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry again. You’re right.” 

“Christ I was worried.”

“Deliverance?”

“Yeah. Deliverance.”

“Well, I’m fine. Good, really. The people here are great. I’m going to stay a while.”

“What? Really? Doing what?”

“Uhm, I’m working at this lodge…”

Kristie lets her blubber silently like a fish for a minute before saying, “Okay, what’s really going on.”

“No, really! I’m just working at this lodge. Doing shows.”

“What, every day?!”

“Well, and I’m doing some other stuff around the place.”

“Oh Jesus. You’re being fucking human trafficked aren’t you? I told you this would happen—“

“You’re spiraling.”

“Christ. Okay, fine, I’m spiraling, but you’re lying.”

“Okay, I’m not really doing shows. Look, man, the place is empty and they really need the workers, and they’re putting me up totally for free and I’m making money. It’s so fucking nice here, they have a hot springs out back… Everyone is so nice. It’s great. I’m staying.”

“This is so suspicious.”

“Man, no it isn’t. They don’t care about the magic shows they just need someone to do dishes. It’s so chill.”

“Alright. Why haven’t you called me then?”

Aubrey chews a nail.

“Right. Okay.” Kristie is getting pissed. The vocal tone shift is extremely delicate and difficult to hear, but it is definitely there. Aubrey breaks immediately, this isn’t working.

“Look! Okay, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you everything!” 

“Oh my God. If I angrily hang up this phone and then call you back will you pick up?”

“It depends when you call back, I’m not always here to hear it. But I will dutifully call you every day until you stop screening me, if you want.”

“Will you?” Kristie says, deadly flat.

“Yes.” Aubrey says. “Yes, I absolutely will.”

Kristie hangs up.

 

The next day, Barclay is making breakfast in the kitchen while Aubrey dials. He says, “Calling the family?”

“No. Just a friend.”

“Oh. Everything okay?” Aubrey guesses her tone of voice had not been as calm as she thought.

“I missed out on a few phone calls scheduled with a friend while I was dealing with the monster stuff and now she’s angry at me for that but really mostly for lying really obviously when she asked why I was staying here. She got so mad she hung up but I promised to call her back so… I’m doing it.” Aubrey thinks she manages a calm tone. By the end, at least.

Barclay laughs, and then immediately looks guilty. “Well, uh… Man. That’s a dilemma, isn’t it? Can you… uh… just explain to her that you can’t say what you’re doing?” Barclay sounds like he knows this is a dumbass thing to say. 

“I think she thinks I’m getting sex trafficked.”

“What’s that?”

Aubrey sighs. “I mean she thinks something bad is happening to me here? Like I may be getting taken advantage of?”

Barclay looks deeply uncomfortable. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Well don’t… tell her about... you know.”

“I know.” Aubrey says, but on the edge of yelling. Barclay laughs again, but in an extremely uncomfortable way.

Kristie does not pick up, and Aubrey leaves.

 

That night is not a great night, and Aubrey has a drink with Dani, and that’s nice—then Dani goes to bed and Aubrey decides she wants another drink. 

She’s just—tired. She goes up to bed and lies there, playing snake on her defunct cell phone. She’s thinking about when she lost her virginity—this was before her mom died—and how she felt afterwards. Cracked up, like a different person than when she had walked into the room, like she was living someone else’s life. She hasn’t told anyone about it, because she knows it’s fine, it’s obviously fine—it’s just strange and disorienting, sex is, especially the first time. She just can’t figure out a way to word it that doesn’t make it sound dangerous, pathological, like something is very, very wrong. She thinks about this again, watching the snake get longer. It had been bad sex for both of them, she thinks. He had wanted to do things she didn’t want to do.

If Mama is dead—something she has been thinking about constantly—Aubrey does not know what will happen. If Mama is dead then things like lawyers and wills will be involved. Unless Mama left the Lodge to Barclay or something—but Barclay is not a real legal person, probably. Probably there will be a search for a living relative, probably if Mama is dead then all of these people will be displaced.

Aubrey wants to have sex again. She’s afraid she’ll never like it, but she wants to, and she thinks she’ll have to try again if she wants to like it. Everyone says losing your virginity usually isn’t great sex. She thinks about maybe trying something here. There’s no Tinder, but surely she could find someone who was down for something casual. Does she want—she doesn’t, she realizes, abruptly, that she feels nauseated, that her stomach has clenched.

She sits up and tries to breathe deeply and regularly. She’s reminded of her magic practice that day—doing magic is unsettling sometimes because the feelings are so new, so surprising, a whole world of sensations with no words for them. Practicing with Barclay is difficult for this reason; she never wants to do something that might feel new. She can’t explain why, but instinctively she does not want to feel something she can’t describe in front of someone who can’t empathize. That feels dangerous. It makes her avoid doing new things, makes her practice the same moves over and over, when Barclay is around. Producing fire is all rage and joy—these are simple and uncomplicated things, with nice neat names. 

Sometimes, when she’s alone, she can feel the crest of a wave in her, or some kind of spinning whirlwind, just on the edge of manifestation. This is accompanied by something overwhelming, though, and she can’t seem to let it out, is still too afraid to. It’s peculiar, and indescribable. Almost like tasting a new fruit or having a new part of your body touched. She still feels like that hasn’t happened to her. When she was having sex before, her body, all her sensations had felt dead.

She doesn’t know how this magic works, she thinks abruptly. What if she can do things she hasn’t even thought of? What if she could find Mama, or know whether she was alive or dead? What if the knowledge of Mama’s life is just being held back by her own fear? She’s afraid of dissolving into whatever energy is inside her, afraid of becoming a star or a bomb, something purely physical, destroying herself as a person, even if herself as a person is a smaller thing than what she could become. But some fears you have to negotiate with. Some fears you have to both respect and disregard in turn, and she thinks this is one of those. 

She unspools something deep in her chest, and realizes how much she had been holding back. There’s grief for her mom and anger at her dad and disgust with herself and longing for Mama and horrible fear and this anxious, ravenous curiosity. She desires so much and so intensely, like an animal with no guile and no words, just desperation. From her chest, and her stomach, something rises out of her—a pure white light, streaming from her body, which intensifies until it outshines the lamp on the bedside table. Aubrey closes her eyes against it, it’s so bright. The blackness behind her lids turns red, then orange, and then the light fades. 

She runs downstairs, into the kitchen, thankfully empty, and dials Kristie again.

“This had better be good.”

“Thank God. Something is happening to me—there’s something about our family that my mom never told me that has to do with this place, and I can’t ask her about it and I can’t explain all of it but the people here are wrapped up in it too and we’re all going to figure it out together. It’s fucking me up that I can’t tell you but it’s so insane that you probably wouldn’t even believe me. I promise I am not being sex trafficked I just have to figure this out. She’s gone and this is my only option and things have started happening where I have to, I don’t have a choice.” 

Kristie is silent for a minute. “Okay, thank you. Okay. I will believe you, you know that, don’t you? Of course I will. If you ever tell me.”

Aubrey stares at the phone. “You’re not mad?”

“I wanted the truth, but I don’t need the whole truth all the time. You are allowed to have secrets, but I need to know… I need to know that you’re alright, I guess.”

Aubrey blurts, “There’s something weird happening.”

There’s a silence over the line. “You just told me everything was fine.”

“I mean there’s something weird with me. But I… you have to promise not to like. Think it’s weird.”

“Okay. I promise I will think the weird thing is totally normal.”

Aubrey sighs, but tries to start anyway. “The woman who welcomed me here, she disappeared… And I keep thinking she’s going to show up again but she hasn’t yet, and the things happening to me are so strange and overwhelming and I think I might… Have you ever…”

“Have I ever what?”

“Have you ever wanted to… Have you ever been attracted to someone. Who you maybe hadn’t thought you would be attracted to? Like say, a woman who’s maybe a little older than you?”

There is a long pause on the line. “So, no. But I think you know that. Why is that worrying you? Look, bodies are strange things, sexualities are strange things. How old is she?”

Aubrey tilts her head. How old is Mama? “I don’t know. Like thirty?”

“Oh! Wow.”

“What?!”

“That’s older than I was thinking.”

Aubrey groans, then laughs. “Come on, man.”

Kristie, irritatingly, also laughs. “Aubrey, this is the least of your worries. Look, you knew already you were bi. Probably you should not have sex with her, but this attraction is probably harmless. Is she being weird? Is she even into women?”

“I have no idea if she is or not, but no, she’s not being weird.”

“Good. Just don’t sleep with her and everything will be fine. Crushes are just crushes.”

Aubrey thinks to herself that this is a little reductive, but then, she can’t really explain this to Kristie. She doesn’t understand it well enough herself. Or maybe Kristie is right. There’s so much else going on, that must be why this is messing her up so much. If Mama is okay, maybe she’ll come back and then maybe Aubrey will be over it. And Mama must be okay, like Dani said, she’s fine. Suddenly, she’s exhausted. “Kristie? I’m so tired. I’m… can I call you back?”

“Sure. Thanks for… thanks. You better fucking keep in touch.”

“I will. I promise you, I will. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

 

Aubrey cannot make the light come back. No matter what she does—she even tries drinking. She doesn’t tell anyone about it because she knows what Dani will say, and it will be a question about Aubrey’s feelings. The magic stuff always comes back to that, like developing magical powers comes with court ordered therapy appointments.

Actually, Aubrey has gone to therapy and it is not nearly as stressful as this. She decides to head over to the Cryptonomica. Ned is reliably entertaining and Kirby is the person most culturally similar to Aubrey she’s met in the entire town—they are the same age, and were both raised on the internet. Doing nothing is an art she’s still perfecting, and there are so many varieties of doing nothing available to one in Kepler. Right now she plans on practicing her shooting the shit skills. 

When she walks in, there are no customers, and Ned and Kirby get suddenly quiet.

“Talking about me?” She asks. 

Kirby laughs, but he also continues to look uncomfortable. This is a great development. 

“Friend Aubrey, I do not gossip!” Ned says. Ned doesn’t look uncomfortable, which makes sense. Ned experiences very little guilt, as a general rule.

“Ooh, are you planning out another fake cryptid sighting?”

Ned turns immediately and viciously to Kirby, who puts his hands up and actually pushes his chair back a bit. “Kirby, I swear to—“

“Ned, I met you in a wookie costume. Did you think I didn’t know what you were doing?”

Ned turns back to her. Kirby looks relieved. “Well, I guess… I don’t know what I thought.”

Aubrey has also read the Lamplighter. “Is it mothman?”

“Fuck, Aubrey.” Kirby mutters. 

“Oh! The drones!” She says. She starts to laugh. What a disaster in progress she’s stumbled upon here!

“What drones?!” Ned says, more in frustration than genuine enquiry.

“I’ve had so many friends who had drones and wanted to be a fucking youtuber or whatever. I recognize the packaging of the noobie models. It was just in that trash can right there, man. I absolutely thought Kirby was doing something normie with it, so I’m so glad I was wrong. Please, please, I am so bored currently—let me help you fake mothman.”

Ned taps his foot for only a second before throwing up his hands. “Fine!”

Aubrey spends a very good couple of hours at the Cryptonomica, and in the woods around it, playing moderator between Kirby’s slightly too cheerful internet savvy and Ned’s cynicism, the blackest and purest cynicism that Aubrey has ever encountered. She gets her boots muddy and has a brief cameo as mothman before they decide to go in a different direction with it. 

She goes back to Amnesty feeling much more cheerful about things. Sure, she has to access her feelings or whatever, which is grim, but you can’t access all your feelings in a few days. She’s got time! She’s got plenty of time. 

 

This is, of course, when Aqualung shows up. 

Aubrey resents how both monsters feel like a purposeful training course for her magic skills. She worries even thinking this makes her selfish, self-aggrandizing, she worries alternately about her sanity and about the machinations of an as-yet-unseen puppetmaster, she even feels partially responsible for Calvin Owens’ obvious terror. She cannot get Mama’s voice out of her head, what a coincidence.

Aubrey sits herself down and has a real talk with herself about it, and tells herself to stop being so dramatic. It mostly works. She starts having fun again after that. Conning her way through the water park is fun, watching Barclay working with the ancient laptop is fun. Even the beginning of the fight is fun, though it goes bad quickly. She dreams that night of Duck’s shadowy form in the water, his head tipped back and his whole body rigid, like he was being restrained. She remembers how unfairly beautiful the floodlight on the reservoir was. 

She also can’t get the wind magic to work again, which is frustrating. She recruits Dani. 

“What do you think? What would you do?”

Dani drinks her hot chocolate. “What were you feeling?” 

Aubrey sighs. At least this time she has an answer. “I think I was feeling like I wanted to protect Ned and Duck.”

“That’s not an emotion.”

“Okay, okay. I was feeling… fear?”

“Try again.”

“I… care about my friends. Jesus. Corny.”

“The fact that it took three tries for you to admit that is the exact reason you can’t get the wind magic to work again. If I were you, I would work on your considerable problem with being vulnerable around others.”

Aubrey decides to try it right now. “Vulnerability is dangerous.”

“Vulnerability is dangerous if you’re powerless. But you aren’t. If you trust yourself—trust yourself to make it through anything, to beat anyone—with help—then you can afford to be vulnerable. Actually, you can’t afford not to be.”

Aubrey puts her head on the table. “It is fucked up how wise that was.”

“Thank you.”

So that isn’t really very helpful.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, more nebulous discussion of homophobia and (sort of) sexual violence, nothing explicit. Also, totally vanilla fun stone smut.

As it turns out, Mama is alive, although not well-off. 

 

Aubrey and Barclay spend a lot of time in the hospital with Mama. They trade off, she sleeps a lot of the time. 

Aubrey has very much not been thinking about Mama pulling her from the cave. She doesn’t think it’s productive to get overly emotional about it, since Mama so obviously saw it as no big deal. That’s not the first time someone’s saved her life, anyway. Her mom, of course, saved her life countless times. Pulled her out of the street, drove her to the emergency room, taken scissors and forks and bleach out of her tiny hands. Thinking about it now, Aubrey thinks that none of those things were even a big deal, not really. And the reason why is obvious: saving a life doesn’t compare to creating a life, and creating a life doesn’t compare to sustaining it. Nothing, no possible debt, could compare to her mom cooking her nightly dinner, sitting by her sickbeds, enduring tantrum after tantrum, and holding her for hours in infancy, when you need to be touched just to live. Her dad had done all these things for her, too. And the two of them had done them for each other, while Aubrey looked on and learned—which was its own kind of priceless gift. 

Kristie had drunkenly taken Aubrey’s keys off her when Aubrey was five drinks in a few days after the fire. Aubrey had fought her bitterly on it—maybe she had even taken a swing at Kristie. Aubrey can’t remember it anymore. She had been desperate to leave, to not be stuck in Kristie’s house, where her mother had stood in the entryway countless times to pick Aubrey up from sleepovers, where she had brought salads or tostones for potlucks and help set up the bonfire they would have on the fourth of July. But maybe there had been a suicidal impulse somewhere under there too—Aubrey is sure she would have died if she had gotten behind the wheel. Kristie had hugged her in the middle of the fight, hard and awkward and crushing, as if to stop her, physically, from leaving. 

Mama had pulled Aubrey out of her mom’s arms. She’s trying not to think about that when she lands again on Duck, underwater and drowning. She thinks what was so awful about it was that he was trapped, like being buried alive, like her mom under the roof—and one of the joists must have—because it was closed casket—and Aubrey hadn’t known until—and she had screamed—and she—missed the rest of the funeral. 

Whose idea was that anyway? Funerals. Public mourning? What an idea.

No one had told her ahead of time because it had been obvious. Between the fire and the roof collapse… But the idea of never seeing her mother’s face again had been. Too hard to think about, and so she hadn’t, until it had happened. 

She’s crying, of course, and Duck walks in, of course. 

“Aubrey!” He says. “Wow!” Then he looks horrified with himself.

She bursts out laughing. It’s impossible not to. 

“Look, aw, man. Okay, I was trying to uuuh. I was just surprised!”

“It’s fine, Duck.”

“Look, hey. I know you’re worried. But she’s a tough cookie. The toughest. And this place is a little, uh, gloomy. Maybe you should get out of here.”

Yeah, Aubrey should. Duck’s right—the hospital is making it difficult to separate her own stay here from right now, making it difficult to not think about death. She had gotten treated for smoke inhalation after the fire, too. The first fire. And the doctors say Mama will be fine.

But then she’ll be all alone with all this shit. She’s already worked herself up. Mama is a comforting presence, even asleep. She’s the most solid person Aubrey’s ever met.

She’s been silent way too long. Duck clears his throat and says, “Want to have a drink? You could meet my cat like you’ve been asking.”

“Okay!” Aubrey says, relieved. 

Aubrey learns so many things that night. First of all, Duck keeps Beacon in a kitchen cabinet, and Beacon mutters constantly. It’s super unsettling. Sometimes Duck’s cat hangs out in the cabinet too, especially when it’s afraid of a new person—cats love cabinets. Beacon hates this. The cat is a black cat with one white sock, with a dramatic elfin face and a chubby, dangly little paunch, like a rejected witch’s familiar. It takes a while to warm up, and it’s easily spooked, but Aubrey has it on her lap before too long. Also, Junot Divine has a crush on Duck, and Duck has no idea. From the sound of it, it’s been going on a long time. 

Aubrey doesn’t tell Duck about any of it, and Duck would never ask. But she feels better anyway. Vulnerability, she goes to sleep thinking. Is that what that was?

 

Then Mama is out of the hospital, and with a captive.

Aubrey doesn’t feel great about it. If Aubrey’s magic is Sylvan, and this is what the corrupted areas of Sylvain do to perfectly sane, dedicated people, and if she sometimes feels overwhelmed by internal energy that she thinks could ablate her humanity slowly over time, is this what’s on the other end of that threat? Or something like this? She avoids the cellar for a while. In fact, she tries not to think about it at all.

Mama is right about one thing: coincidences are everywhere. She’s shown up just when the threat is intensifying to the point where Mama is willing to risk her life to find even one tiny hint about what could come next. Aubrey is struggling not to feel like a protagonist. This is real life, she reminds herself, where the bad guys often win and absolutely no one is too important to die. It isn’t a grimdark comic book, either: it’s not just death to be afraid of, but inconvenient death, cheap death, mundane death.

 

When Aubrey goes down to the kitchen to call Kristie one night, Mama is there unexpectedly, putting the final touches on a homemade cane with a small knife. Aubrey is going to die; Mama even has a tiny knick in one of her knuckles. 

“You didn’t want to… Buy a cane?”

Mama looks up. “Hey Aubrey. Naw, there’s no good place for that in town. I don’t got much to do but think about things.”

Aubrey leans on the wall. 

“Well, uh, what are you doing up at this time of night?” Mama asks, awkwardly. Was Aubrey looking? Jesus.

“Oh, uh, I was just going to call my friend from home. We have a regular thing around now.”

“Oh, well, I’m in your way then. You want privacy?”

Aubrey says, out of nowhere, “Thank you for pulling me out of the cave. I never got a chance to say it.”

“Well, thanks for driving me to the hospital. Sitting with me.”

“Don’t do that to us again. Tell us where you’re going next time.”

“Aw, well—“

“I was really worried about you.”

“That’s sweet, but—“

“I know you’ve been doing it a long time, but really. Barclay cried.”

Mama laughs. “He sure didn’t, but thanks.”

Aubrey sits down and says, “Pulling me out of the cave. That was totally different than driving you to the hospital.”

“Naw, I—“

“Totally different.”

“What are you looking for me to say here, Aubrey?” Mama asks, sounding for the first time just a little annoyed. 

Aubrey has absolutely terrible impulse control, and she loves hearing her name in that accent. She leans forward and kisses Mama on the mouth. Mama tastes like bourbon, like smoke and wood and alcohol. Mama touches Aubrey’s cheek as if to keep her in place, and makes a slight move to deepen the kiss before she seems to come to her senses and pulls away.

“Aubrey Little, what the fuck are you doing?”

Aubrey looks her in the eyes—her pupils are wider than they were, with the fluorescent bulb above their heads. Aubrey is not the kind of person to second-guess herself here; Mama is obviously into this. But it’s out of the blue, and Mama doesn’t know where Aubrey’s coming from. Is she experimenting, is she sure, will she be upset later? Aubrey has no idea how to reassure her, this is out of her area of expertise by several miles. “I—I’m—I’m sorry I—“

“Jesus, I’m ten years older than you, I’m—what are you after?”

“What am I after?” Aubrey says, hears the poison in her voice, and then thinks, oh, no. But she’s already said it, so she pushes on. “Are you so lonely and suspicious that you can’t even fathom that someone might find you genuinely attractive?”

Mama looks in her eyes for a long minute. It’s unsettling—Mama’s eyes are green, with a brown chink in one of them like a cup with a chip in it, and the cliché is true. Some people really can look right through you. “No.” Mama says, finally. “You’re right. We’ve only known each other a little while, but I know you.”

Just once, Aubrey would like to say out loud that she wants this, and have not one person ask her why. Just once, Aubrey would like to not walk out of a conversation about what she wants wondering what’s wrong with her. “Am I off-base, here? Are you not into this?” Aubrey asks, fishing. 

“If you’re asking if I’m into women, you already know I am.”

“Are you into me?”

“Aubrey, I ain’t—“

“So, yes.”

“Don’t you have to call your friend?”

“Just kiss me a little. Isn’t that harmless?” Aubrey comes around the table and touches Mama’s cheek, draws her in. Luckily, Mama is not the kind of person who’s capable of backing down.  
“I don’t got the self-control for that, Aubrey, come on—“ 

By the time the kiss is over, Mama’s hands are on her ribcage, a thumb rubbing rhythmically. It feels amazing. Aubrey has never been touched like this. Mama says, “I got to warn you, there’s some things I don’t like to do. I don’t always like to, well, I, I don’t like to get touched too much. I don’t always, really, want to take my clothes off, I. I mean I never do. God, I’m sorry, I’m out of practice explaining this. The last person I—she already knew about it.”

Aubrey decodes this. “You don’t want me to do anything to you?”

“Yeah, that’s about right. That okay?”

“I’m just going to be the absolute center of attention the entire time?”

Mama smiles. “Yep. That’s how I like it.”

“Oh, awesome.” Aubrey breathes.

This is terrible decision making, Aubrey briefly registers. She absolutely does not care. They walk all of fifteen feet to Mama’s door, where she says, “While we’re doing this, could you call me Bridget?”

Aubrey is gut-punched for a second. “Yeah, of course.”

Aubrey’s skin sings where it’s touched. She feels self-conscious for the first few minutes, but soon she’s too turned on to be afraid, or really to think clearly—this is vastly different than her first experience. They move from making out to Bridget kissing her way down Aubrey’s chest, rolling her nipples between her fingers. She seems to know exactly what to do, exactly how much pressure, how quickly. She leans down to use her mouth and Aubrey makes a noise. 

“You’ve got to stop doing that.” Bridget says, low.

“Hm?”

“I’m sorry, but you have to be quiet—the walls are thin. You’re… I love the noise, I do,” She rubs a hand down Aubrey’s waist, “but you are being very obvious.”

Aubrey rolls her hips, impatiently. “Okay.”

Bridget leans down, her mouth is hot, and Aubrey really is trying. Then she strokes between Aubrey’s legs and Aubrey forgets about being quiet, instead she groans and wraps her legs around Bridget’s waist, hooks her feet together and pulls. “Sweetheart, I will stop if you keep making noise.” Aubrey’s entire body shudders. “Aubrey?”

“Uh—uh-huh. Okay.”

She finds the button on Aubrey’s jeans. “Do you want me to?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Aubrey’s naked. Bridget kisses her again with her hand in between Aubrey’s legs, and Aubrey rocks into it. Bridget makes her way back down, and kisses Aubrey’s thighs, says, “This okay?”

“What?” Aubrey asks, aware she sounds drunk somehow, far away.

“Can I, uh, eat you out?”

“Mm. Yeah. You don’t have to ask.”

“I do, actually.” Bridget says, and goes for it. No one has ever done this for Aubrey, and Bridget’s mouth is so, so hot. Heat and pleasure bloom outwards from the broad stroke of her tongue, the gentle sucking; her muscles tense and relax; the feeling takes up her whole mind and destroys her thoughts. It pulses, builds, crescendos. Aubrey’s back arches and then she curls up, she had no idea this could feel this good. Bridget breaks away to say, “Shh.” She puts a hand on Aubrey’s stomach, and Aubrey relaxes into it. She feels steadied.

Aubrey spreads her fingers over the back of Bridget’s neck, just a feather-light touch. Then Bridget does something else with her tongue and Aubrey’s thighs clench, her hand spasms, she digs her nails into her hip bone just to balance out some of the intensity of the feeling. She can’t keep quiet. It’s too much. Bridget sucks harder and something cracks in her, the feeling turns boiling hot, so intense that Aubrey doesn’t know if it’s pleasure or pain. She puts her knuckle in her mouth and bites to keep quiet, her muscles clench and she rides it out, then yanks Bridget’s head away. She cannot take one more second.

As soon as her head is gone Aubrey wants it back. She looks up to see her wipe her mouth off, rub her thumb reverently over Aubrey’s hipbone and lean down to kiss her gently on the knee. “Do you want…”

“Your hands.” Aubrey says, urgently, suddenly she wants it so badly she literally can’t stand it, she can feel an ache in her cunt. It feels like a sharp hunger pang or a sucking vacuum or an absolute void. “Your hand, please, Bridget, please—“

“Okay, honey, relax. I will. Don’t worry.” She says, smoothing a thumb down the crease of Aubrey’s thigh and looking at Aubrey like she’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. “I love this part.” She says, so quiet Aubrey can barely hear it.

Aubrey almost feels like sobbing, she wants this so bad. “Please, please, please, please.” She chants, over and over, as Bridget spreads lube over her fingers and slowly pushes inside. “Oh!” Aubrey lets out, breathy and broken up and astonished. Aubrey thinks about magic again, thinks about all the sensations there are no words for. Bridget starts to move in her, and Aubrey thinks that she had only known a fraction of the map, that the inside of her body goes on forever. 

Bridget twists her fingers a little, and Aubrey lifts off the bed like a zombie. Her eyes roll back. “Oh, there it is.” She sounds smug.

Aubrey mumbles something with a question mark at the end. 

“Your g-spot. A little further in than usual. No one has ever found it before?” Aubrey doesn’t say that she had been previously 50/50 on whether or not it existed. Obviously, it does, and it feels incredible, beyond pleasurable and into transformative. Aubrey’s body feels new. Aubrey has no idea what Bridget’s hand is doing insider her, but she does something and strokes her thumb over her clit at the same time. The two sensations, totally different, ring out in her body like three notes making a chord. Aubrey reaches her hand down, grabbing, and catches Bridget’s other hand, squeezes the life out of it. She brings it up and kisses Aubrey’s knuckles.

Aubrey remembers the knick on Bridget’s knuckle, thinks that she is bleeding into her. Aubrey can’t catch her breath. 

Bridget rocks in and out, changing the angle, the pressure. This sensation is so far beyond what she thought her body could give her that she feels possessed, afraid of her own body, monstrous. She has no idea what her body is about to do. She’s never felt this good. Dimly, she thinks about an orchestra coming into tune. 

Bridget leans down, puts her mouth on Aubrey’s clit, licks over it with one long stroke and sucks it in. Aubrey screams, her body curls like a ribbon, or a burning scrap of paper, the sensation explodes and keeps exploding, overtaking her. Finally, she can’t take it anymore, and grabs Bridget’s wrist to stop her as her body convulses once, twice more, until she relaxes. Bridget pulls out carefully, puts her clean hand on Aubrey’s cheek as her eyes flutter open. “Are you alright?”

“Mm.” Aubrey says, feeling almost concussed. “Mhm. Thank you.”

Bridget laughs. Aubrey looks at her, sees the patchy red flush up her neck and over her cheek, the thin ring of green around her pupils, the quickness of her breathing. She looks a little wrecked herself. “You don’t have to thank me. I loved it.”

“Oh.” Aubrey says, “That’s good. Should I—do I have to—“

“You don’t have to do anything, sweetheart.” Bridget says, and lays down next to her. Aubrey rolls over, puts her head on Bridget’s shoulder, and passes out immediately. 

 

Aubrey wakes up panicked the next morning, at 4:53 AM, with Bridget still fast asleep under her. She starts awake and sits up, then flushes entirely over her whole body. She is completely naked and she still feels sticky between her legs. Fuck. 

This is generally her middle-of-the-night pee time, and she does have to pee. But she also has a deep need to not be seen leaving Mama’s room in yesterday’s clothes. Bridget’s room? Fuck. She’s got to get out of here before anyone else wakes up. 

She gets up and puts her shirt on. This is when Bridget opens her eyes, and Aubrey flushes again.

“Good morning.” Bridget whispers. She sees Aubrey putting her clothes on. “Given your normal wake-up time is around ten, I’m guessing we’re keeping this a secret?”

Aubrey freezes. “Should we not? What should we do?” She pulls on her underwear, painfully self-conscious.

“How about we do whatever you want. I really don’t mind, I’ll just follow your lead. You can always change your mind later.”

“Oh. Okay, yeah. I don’t really want it to be a huge deal.”

“Okay. Are you still feeling okay?”

Aubrey checks in with herself. “Yeah. Are you? I mean was it okay? I feel like I wasn’t… fully in control. Did I… do anything… weird?” Aubrey’s voice wobbles on the last word.

“No, no, it was great. Don’t worry, you’re loud, but I like loud. I like reactive. It’s not that unusual.”

Aubrey’s embarrassed to ask but she needs to hear it. “There’s nothing wrong with me?”

Bridget sits up, her face is concerned now. “Of course not. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You did know you were… into women before this?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Okay. I didn’t do anything to make you feel…”

“No, no. I think that’s… internal.”

“Okay. Well. If you need anything—“

“No, I feel. That was great. I feel great, honestly.”

Bridget smiles. “Okay.”

Aubrey sits down heavily on the bed to look for her socks under the covers. “I’m going back to bed.” 

“Yeah. You should get a full night after that.” 

Aubrey goes back to sleep in her own bed for a while. 

 

Aubrey wakes up feeling amazing. Her body just feels good bone-deep. She showers, thoroughly, and thinks about last night. She wonders if Bridget would do that again—maybe if Aubrey were a little quieter. She realizes that she is ravenously hungry. When Aubrey goes into the kitchen Barclay is laughing. He’s not the most cheerful guy, but then, these haven’t been the most cheerful times. 

“Who was it?”

“None of your damn business.” Mama says. 

Dani walks in behind Aubrey. “What’s happening?”

Barclay and Mama look up, and Aubrey abruptly remembers screaming last night.

“Nothing.” Mama says, at precisely the same time that Barclay says, “Mama’s got fingernail marks in her wrist.” Oh God, Aubrey thinks, did she really? She really did. 

“Okay?” Dani asks, innocently. Jesus.

Aubrey laughs, hoping it doesn’t sound embarrassed. Hoping it sounds like she’s hoping Mama’s embarrassed, although in fact she’s hoping that Mama is totally calm as usual. And she is, Aubrey can’t get anything out of Mama’s expression. 

Barclay says, “That means she got laid last night, Dani.”

“Oh! Was that what that noise was?” Dani asks. 

“Noise?” Barclay asks, delighted.

Mama points to Dani and just says, with an air of finality, “No.”

Dani throws up her hands and goes to pour herself a coffee. Aubrey realizes that she’s trapped here, leaving would be too suspicious.

“Did Amelia come back to nurse you to full health?” Barclay asks, sickening sweet.

“Again, none of your business.”

“Amelia?” Dani asks. “I haven’t seen her around.”

“Amelia is in the north. She told me the name. Canania?” Moira says, coming into the kitchen from behind Aubrey. Aubrey realizes she hasn’t moved and goes to get a coffee herself. 

“Canada?” Aubrey guesses. She looks for eggs in the refrigerator and heats up a frying pan. 

“Yes.” Mama says. 

“So she’s still there?” Barclay asks. “Jesus, I thought you two were still, well, at least…”

“Amelia is a very good friend of mine.” Mama says, somewhat harshly. “And if you don’t stop pushing I will shut down that hot spring for good.”

“Oh, come on.” Barclay says. “I’m dying to know.”

“You really will be dying to know. Real soon.” Mama threatens. 

“What are we talking about?” Moira asks.

“Mama had sex last night, apparently.” Dani says. Moira makes a face.

“Don’t you two start! This conversation is over.”

Barclay’s head tips to the side slightly, a worryingly intent look on his face. “Fine.” He says. “But we’ll figure it out. We always do.”

Moira looks contemplative. “Amelia is your friend? I thought you were lovers.”

“Stay out of it, all of you.” Mama growls, and takes her coffee into her office.

“Wow.” Aubrey comments. 

Barclay looks after her for a while. “I don’t know why she’s so sensitive about Amelia.”

“Who’s that?” Aubrey says, hoping it comes out casual.

“Hmm.” Moira says. “If lovers isn’t the right human word I don’t know what is. All of this on Earth is very complicated. It is simpler in Sylvain.”

“Well, Mama used to say they were together. She used to live down the road from the Lodge, but she would be here all the time.” Barclay says. 

“For how long?”

“Oh, a long time. Maybe three years? But Amelia left town maybe a year and a half back.”

“They broke up?”

Barclay taps his chin. “Hm, I don’t know what the right word is. They aren’t together anymore, but occasionally Amelia will come back for a few days. She still owns that place. But she’ll spend the first few days here sleeping in Mama’s bed, they’ll have a terrible fight, she’ll leave for a few days, maybe come back or maybe not.”

“Oh my God.” Aubrey says, faintly.

“I don’t know. Are they broken up, do you think? Mama won’t say a word. She never has.”

Aubrey winces. “That sounds like a yes, but a painful one. No wonder she didn’t love that conversation.”

Moira says, “Amelia is a lovely woman. She’s very intelligent.”

“Smartest there is.” Barclay agrees. 

“Was she on the pine guard?” Aubrey asks. 

“No, no. She just knew about it.” Barclay says. 

“What else was she like?” Aubrey asks. She knows she’s overdoing it but she’s intensely curious.

“Oh, very pretty.” Dani says. “Hm, a powerful personality.” Barclay snorts.

“I believe she travels for work. Something very technical.” Moira says.

“Wow.” Aubrey says. “So Mama has a great love?” 

“No, Mama don’t have a great love.” Mama says, from behind where Aubrey is flipping her eggs. She cracks the yolk, she’s so startled. 

“Fuck.” Aubrey turns around to face her.

“Mama’s got a hot ex and a set of nosy fucking houseguests. Stop talking about my love life so I can get my cereal in peace.”  
Aubrey can tell she’s turned scarlet but she tries to push through. “It’s no fun to ban gossip.”

Mama gives her a look that is part intimidation, part reproach, and part pure danger. She shuts the refrigerator with finality and says, “No gossip.” She leaves with her cereal.

“Whoops.” Barclay says. “God, I’m gonna pay for that.”

 

Aubrey calls Kristie that night.

“Hey, sorry.” She opens. 

“It’s okay.” Kristie says. 

“How was the test?”

Kristie sighs. “Honestly? Unfair. But I feel guilty saying it because I think I did well anyway. It’s hard to watch other people struggle even though their understanding is good, though.”

“Yeah. I get that.”

“College is a lot of watching people fail for no real reason. Or for terrible horrible the world is a bad place kind of reasons?”

“Like…”

“Like, I don’t know. One of my, well, not really friends, I don’t know her that well, but she has to send money home to her family. So like she has to work a ton. So of course she’s not going to do as well.”

“Yeah.” Aubrey says quietly.

“What about you? How are things?”

The problem is that while Kristie is not the ideal friend to talk to about this—too much of a mom friend—Aubrey doesn’t have an ideal friend to talk about this with. “Okay, so, please… try not to judge too much. Okay?”

“Oh God. No, you know what? I will not judge. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s not a big deal.”

“I slept with her.”

“Oh my God, with the thirty year old woman you had a crush on?!”

“Ha, uh. Yeah.”

“Oh my God!”

“Kristie.”

“Jesus. I said I wasn’t going to judge, okay. She should not have done that. I mean primarily this is on her.”

It’s odd to be cast as a victim without your consent. But Aubrey knows that people are victims without knowing sometimes—that they figure out years later, once they know themselves better or once they know other people better. They look back and recognize their own signs of discomfort, or the carefully placed signals designed to manipulate them. It’s even happened to her. She thinks it happens to a lot of people. She would love to say that she knows that won’t happen, but Kristie wouldn’t believe her, and it wouldn’t be true anyway. She doesn’t know; it’s impossible to know. But she did it—it’s done. It can’t be undone. She says what’s true. “I don’t think she was trying to take advantage of me. I sort of pushed her into it.”

“God, Aubrey. I wish you hadn’t done that. This was a one-time thing, right?”

“You’re not gonna ask me how it was?”

“I will, after you answer my questions about your safety.”

“I don’t know if we’ll do it again. She was so hesitant the first time that I don’t know if she will.”

“Aubrey. You seem to be saying that you are going to try to sleep with her again. Please don’t do that. This is not a good thing.”

Aubrey chews on her nail while the silence drags out. She doesn’t know what she’s going to say but she opens her mouth and what falls out is, “I’ve never been so attracted to anyone in my life. I don’t think I knew what attraction was before this.”

There’s a very long pause as Kristie works this out. “What is it about her?”

Aubrey thinks for a long time. “I don’t know. I jumped her after I saw her making her own cane—oh, she just twisted her ankle. She was carving it with this little knife, but she’d gotten it out of the woods and clearly cut it down a lot. She tasted like bourbon. Ugh, I don’t want to TMI you.”

“Well, no, I don’t want the dirty details necessarily. I mean, I’d listen but I’m not like. You know. Dying to know.”

Aubrey thinks about it more. She tries to distill it. The leather duster Mama was wearing when they first met—she had gotten in the car, hadn’t she? That was a strange thing to agree to do, to just get in this woman’s car. And it wasn’t because she had trusted Mama on sight, she had been freaked out. But Mama had been alluring somehow, she realizes in retrospect. The way she had smiled at Aubrey’s joke but not gone up to the stage, she wasn’t the kind of person Aubrey could lead around. (Aubrey finds she can lead around a lot of people.) And later, the shotgun was attractive even though it had freaked her out, the solid competence of it, a weapon Mama was totally comfortable with. The way she ran the Lodge, balancing on this knife’s edge between Sylvain and Earth just to keep five or ten people safe from harm. It would have been easier, maybe, to run the pine guard without also sheltering people who presumably were politically inconvenient for Sylvain, but Mama did it anyway. Why? Because she cared about them, but also because she knew she could handle it.

“Aubrey?”

“Competence. Solidity. Power. Confidence but no ego.” Aubrey thinks about Mama’s hands. She’s been ignoring what’s staring her in the face, of course, because she doesn’t want to say it, but she forces it out. “Masculinity. I guess.”

“Masculinity. You hate masculine men. You think they’re pathetic.”

“They are. Because they’re doing it to control people or to feel better about their tiny little lives. But she doesn’t have a tiny life. She’s not insecure. She’s doing it because it’s natural to her. She’s doing it because she just… She just needed a cane and so she made one, she just wanted to wear men’s boots so she did, I mean I don’t want to say she never agonized over it because maybe she did. But she… it’s so… It’s how she’s supposed to look.” Aubrey’s crying a little bit. Why is she crying?

“Is that how you want to look?”

“No. It’s just who I want to… it’s just who I want to spend. It’s just.” Kristie waits. Aubrey turns the phone upside down so she can listen without Kristie hearing her irregular breathing, so she can’t hear her wiping her face. Aubrey braces against the counter in the half dark and breathes deeply. She turns it back around and says, “I’m sorry.”

“Aubrey. I’m here. I don’t have anything else to do. Tell me. What’s going on in your head?”

Aubrey starts crying again, for real this time. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on and that’s the problem. I don’t understand why it was so good, why it made me feel so good. You don’t understand how good it felt! I don’t know why I felt… whole afterwards.”

“Isn’t sex supposed to feel good?”

“Is it?” Aubrey says without thinking, and then feels panicked, like she gave something away. 

“Aubrey, I’m gonna ask you something, and if you can’t talk about it, then you can just not answer, okay? You don’t have to say anything, and I won’t bring it up again, okay?”

“Mhm?” Aubrey doesn’t want her voice to crack.

“Did you like having sex with Austin?” Austin is the boy Aubrey dated for a year, who she lost her virginity to and then broke up with when her mother died. She doesn’t want to think about this. She considers not saying anything, but it’s too late not to think about it—damn Kristie. She thinks about afterwards, feeling disconnected, broken up in the sense of a phone call in a tunnel. She had thought it was gross, all these fluids, and of course! She had thought, of course this is gross. Sex is just gross. How could it not be gross? But she thinks about sex with Mama, how wet she had been and all those fluids coating Mama’s wrist where Aubrey had dug her fingernails in without even knowing, how she had loved the noise of her moving in and out. How she had felt thinking about Mama’s blood—more than turned on, more than happy, something else instead. Aubrey thinks again about the word ravenous. Then she thinks, humbled. Surprised. Transformed, but into a better or larger version of herself, rather than into an object. 

“No.” She says, finally, her voice thick and choked up. She thinks about what had actually happened, him inside her and how much it had hurt, how disgusting she had found his body, how she hated his mouth on her neck, even, felt degraded even by that. “No, I hated it. I hope he dies.”

“Oh, God, Aubrey.”

“I thought that was what it was supposed to feel like.” Aubrey’s really sobbing now. “That’s not what it’s supposed to feel like at all.”

“No.” Kristie says, quietly. “No, that’s not how it’s supposed to feel.”

“God, I’m a lesbian, aren’t I? Jesus. What is my mom gonna say?” She can’t believe she said that. What is she thinking? What’s wrong with her?

Kristie pauses for a split second before she says, “She loved you. She loved you so much, she would have done anything for you and this would not have changed that.” There’s nothing wrong with her, Aubrey realizes. Nothing. She’s just grieving. 

Aubrey hates that people say things like that when someone dies. Kristie never would have implied that before—that nothing her mom thought or believed about the world or said to Aubrey mattered because she loved her. It’s not an unknown sentiment but Kristie wouldn’t have said it or believed it. Aubrey hates everything people say about dead people, and about grief. She hates I’m sorry for your loss, she hates she would have been proud of you, she especially hates things happen for a reason. She actually prefers the people who react with awkward silence. People don’t know what to say so they repeat things they’ve heard, but Aubrey isn’t sympathetic to that either. She just hates it, and hates them, too. Resents them for their clumsiness. Death is everywhere, everyone dies, so why is it so difficult to deal with, why isn’t anyone practiced at it? Aubrey swallows all this down before she speaks. “She didn’t like it. She didn’t like that I was bisexual—as soon as I came out to her she got super positive about Austin. It was because she was worried we would break up and I would date a woman next. She didn’t know how to handle it, and she was…”

“She was worried.” Kristie fills in, almost too quiet to hear.

“Yeah. She said all the right things but I knew her so well.”

“She would have gotten better.”

“Maybe.” Aubrey is silent a long time, trying to put this into words. What she wants to say is that people don’t live forever—no one lives forever, and so it’s absurd to think about a dead person being redeemed in death or after death. Their lives are over. Being redeemed is for living people, because it requires time, and agency. The most coherent thing she manages is, “But that doesn’t matter. She’s dead.”

“Yeah.” Kristie says, and Aubrey is so relieved. Aubrey doesn’t want to hear one more thing about how it can’t be as bad as she thinks it is. Aubrey wants to be allowed to be angry at her mom again, and love her anyway, just like she could when her mom was alive. 

“And that was fucked up.” 

“Yeah. It was. I don’t want… I’m so happy you’ve figured this out. I’m so happy this is true. I want you to be happy so badly, and I don’t care where you live or who you’re with or how weird or secretive your life is, I just want you to be happy again.”

Aubrey closes her eyes and lets this feeling—being loved—wash over her. She feels warmth in her chest and she looks down, and the light is there again. Aubrey says, “Thank you.” Her voice breaks on it, and the light spreads down her torso to her legs, and up her neck to her face and arms, until finally her body is covered. The light plays along the walls in the dim room. Aubrey marvels at it, how it has the quality of sunlight, not like anything artificial. “God, I wish you were here, I wish I could see your face and hug you. I love you.”

“I love you too.” Kristie says. 

They stay on the phone for a while before they decide to go to bed. It’s a nice night.

 

Aubrey still can’t make the light come to her on demand. She had thought maybe this was the last important realization, but no. Maybe she’s not thinking about this right after all. She’s started journaling. The problem is she has so much to say about it, but she doesn’t want to talk to anyone about all of it, really. Admitting it to other people is important, she thinks, but so is saying it to yourself, unvarnished and unregulated. To know that truth without the pressure to fit it into other people’s heads. 

She feels okay about it. Sometimes she’s overwhelmed with the truth of it, with how much of her life she didn’t fully understand until just now. Sometimes she’s ecstatic, so relieved that she won’t ever have to touch another man again that she could cry, or get a labrys tattoo at least. Sometimes she feels horrifically ashamed, disgusting and defective. Sometimes she lays in bed at night trying to figure out if there’s some way she could tolerate fucking a man after all. 

So, on average, she feels okay.

The Lodge starts preparing for the holidays. Since a lot of the sylfs have absolutely nothing to do, they really go all out with the decorations. Dani especially recruits Aubrey for hours of making popcorn chains and re-creating Earth baked goods. Aubrey’s so thankful for it she could cry. Like almost everybody with a dead parent, holidays are hard for her, but Dani’s face after eating a sugar cookies where a simultaneous tablespoon/teaspoon and baking soda/baking powder confusion had been at play was priceless. Aubrey supervises more closely after this. She also learns a lot about the fundamentals of baking from Dani’s mistakes. 

They get a tree. They even make ornaments. Aubrey gives in to an urge and makes a labrys ornament, and like most things that are cheesy and embarrassing, it’s therapeutic. None of the sylfs know what it is, but there is some cultural quirk that makes them very fond of weapon imagery, so they accept it without question. Mama, though, smiles at it. Dani makes a tiny gun, apparently having some kind of fascination with them. Barclay makes a beautiful robin, around the same time that he eats all of those failed sugar cookies, one after the other, without flinching. He has some kind of taste bud mutation. This juxtaposition absolutely ruins the robin. 

When Aubrey had first told her mom she was going to start celebrating Yule, her mom had not laughed precisely, but there had been some tell-tale mouth twitching. But that had only made Aubrey double down, and of course her mother had gotten used to it. They had switched things around, started incorporating pagan traditions into their usual traditions. Years afterwards, Aubrey’s dad had admitted that he liked the new traditions—he had always had an ambivalent-verging-on-hostile relationship with religion. Aubrey’s mom had laughed, then. 

Aubrey should call her dad. She’s not going to be able to do this if she overthinks it for even a second. So she gets up, goes into the kitchen, dodges Barclay’s casserole dish coming out of the oven, and dials the number from memory. Of course, since it’s the middle of the day, she gets the answering machine. For a minute, she debates hanging up, but instead she says, “Hey dad, it’s, it’s Aubrey. I wanted to let you know you can call me at this number since my cellphone isn’t working. Just ask for me.” Then, she chokes out, “I’ll, well, I’ll, maybe I’ll call again later. Talk—talk to you soon.”

Barclay doesn’t say a word.


End file.
